Saving Paper, Wasting Time
An ode to the hard copy time suck
I asked Santa for a computer in 2005, when I was four years old. Santa, much to my surprise, was totally cool with it. As I already knew how to read and write, learning how to use a computer in the 21st-century Information Age could only benefit me—and I was on the nice list—so he brought me a heavy, chunky, Mac Mini desktop. My parents set it up in my playroom, which made me feel very grown-up. Today, I can still access some of the email messages I sent as a child. The oldest one describes two of my favorite books from the library, and the next one describes my self-written, handmade books and magazines.
Cooler than being a kid in a candy store, I was a kid with unrestricted access to the internet—but I was still excited about the possibilities of paper. I could watch videos on a new website called YouTube, but even more fun, I could read trade paperbacks of treasured books. I could play games on www.Webkinz.com, but even more thrilling, I could write stories on yellow construction paper to make a book and print documents on letter-sized office paper to make a magazine. I had an Apple Mac Mini all to myself, but I still loved paper.
As an adult, my appreciation for paper has not dwindled, but I hear increasingly loud noise about a quickly approaching, unavoidable, paperless future. Today and tomorrow, everything is available online: attached in an email, readable at a QR code, uploaded to iCloud, downloaded to Apple Wallet, sent via Dropbox, shared via Google Drive, somewhere in Teams, somewhere on Slack, just click this link—it’s so easy! You’re always losing important little slips of paper, receipts and tickets and whatnot. Your dog ate a piece of something, and now your life is gone because his snack wasn’t backed up to an external drive. Your lightweight laptop or tablet is easier on your back than a bunch of books, and it fits in a cute tote bag. Apple Pencils don’t need to be sharpened. Word documents don’t need white-out. The Microsoft Surface Pro 8 won’t give you a papercut. Plus, computers save time. You can type faster; your correspondence will reach me faster; my correspondence will reach you faster; I can press command-F and find exactly what I need without reading the whole document so I can get through it faster; it’s all so much faster. Catch up: No one has time for paper.
But while all of you Jetsons slam the gas pedal on your fascination with the new and the sexy, I sit back and observe. And I see the necessity for paper.
I was always a strong student, and paper organized my education. My 16-year-old brother is also brilliant, but he often finds difficulty in school—largely because he confines his education to the screen. He reads virtual documents in a chair less than a meter away from blank notebooks and shrink-wrapped textbooks collecting dust in the corner. He can’t page through his history lessons in chronological order; he can’t find the right French notes in his dense web-based storage; and no one can read his math tests because his handwriting, never practiced, is as messy as that of a second-grader. Paperless learning allows my brother to read too fast, write too fast, and think too fast. It lets him fly through information at a rate that exceeds his cognitive speed limit. I just wish someone would give this kid a speeding ticket.
Maybe then he would notice the power of paper, not only for learning, but also for leisure. My 92-year-old grandmother uses her iPad with ease, but she still completes crossword puzzles in handheld books because she likes how it feels to slowly etch out the letters. When I send my mom my writing, she always prints a hard copy before looking at it. She wants to take the time to read it carefully and thoughtfully without missing a word. My dad still gets up from the couch and walks outside, all the way down the front driveway, to bring in print copies of the New York Times. He likes his tried-and-true habit, and I like that holding the whole roll of stories for the day encourages him to consider the newspaper in its entirety. Instead of skimming the breaking news and ignoring the arts criticism to click on the business section and scroll down the page to open a new tab and get to something else, he witnesses a wide view of the world in his hands. The large, thin sheets of wood-pulp newsprint allow him to spend a few moments—more than a few—discovering, learning, and appreciating all the written observations of the globe that day. That time is a break, a breath, a pause.
I keep performances with me long after they end by storing Playbills in memory boxes. I will never replace mindfulness coloring books with the Happy Color app. I refuse to convert to e-books. I spend unnecessary time perusing neighborhood bookstores (instead of Amazon), tracing spines to search for what I want on the shelves (instead of Google), and discovering new finds by scanning back covers (instead of BuzzFeed). I like to hold books and turn the pages. I like the smell of it. I like to stop and smell the paper.
Paper declutters my mind and my life, but more crucially, it connects me to others through the handwritten note. I share love through the funny card I mailed my uncle on his birthday, the have-a-good-day note my mom left in my lunchbox every day of the first grade, and the heartfelt thank-you note I sent my aunt upon receiving a graduation gift. I understand love through paper, and I have yet to find a digital communication of love that would not be better shared on paper. If you type me that you love me, it means nothing. If you tell me that you love me, it touches me for a moment. But if you take out a pen and write on paper that you love me, it remains forever.
As a teenage camper at my beloved performing arts sleepaway camp, I dreaded the end of each summer, but I cherished our parting tradition of giving one another handwritten notes. A note to a best friend should take at least 15 minutes to write, while a note to a mere acquaintance or bitter frenemy should take no more than two. I spent multiple hours of my free time writing notes for my friends, and they did the same. The notes did not fill a practical purpose—we chatted over text, Snapchat, and FaceTime the day after camp and nearly every day that followed—but the notes were still necessary. They were concrete, tangible evidence that the memories and relationships we built over our summers were real. I probably have two hundred of them, and they remain in a purple box in my closet.
As a college student, I returned to the camp as a staff member. Staff members were usually graduate students, professional artists, or certified teachers—real adults—but the camp was understaffed and needed help. I arrived overzealous and underqualified, which must have been at least a little endearing, because I also found myself in a distracting, more-than-platonic friendship with another young teacher. My infatuation with her grew into a care I have only felt for one other person, whose significance to my life is only chronicled in a series of handwritten letters, pieces of paper I keep in a box in my closet—I digress. I was heartbroken when the summer concluded and my time with the young teacher ended, as we lived in different time zones and it seemed she only saw me in her life as a silly, short-term side character.
On the penultimate evening, I knocked on her door and begged her to come to New York for a week, five days, one day, or even just one night. “I can’t,” she said, allegedly needing to move into her faraway apartment immediately, with no time to spare. I remember crying, I remember seeing her come closer to console me, and I remember pushing her away. “We can still be pen pals,” she playfully assured me, alluding to an earlier conversation about our shared love for old-fashioned, handwritten, pen-to-paper snail mail. Her offer sounded like an insult.
A couple of weeks later, I received a letter from her in the mail and squealed a very embarrassing, high-pitched “yeeee!” while standing in the hallway next to the post boxes. The envelope was pink and decorated with stickers. I opened it slowly to prevent an unwanted rip. Inside, there were two loose-leaf pages, written all over, double-sided, with words that made me cry. A third page with adorable doodles that would be confusing to others but were meaningful to me. Evidence that my care was not one-sided.
I was wrong to consider “pen pal” an insult. True, a pen pal is not a wife—but when you write a letter to someone, you carve out time to sit down, write your thoughts on paper, and drop the paper in the mail. When you spend time, you will never get it back. I care about my time. If writing a letter is giving time to someone, then writing a letter is caring about someone; paper is caring—and humanity, if anything, is about caring.
At one point, sometime around 105 CE, a sheet of paper was the latest and greatest technology. Nearly two thousand years later, the world’s pace has accelerated quite a bit, and it’s only going to get faster. But I enjoy taking my time, and taking time is good for me. Every aspect of my life constantly yells at me to speed up, but I really need to slow down. I’m making careless errors; I’m running out of breath; I’m missing the remarkable little detail in the corner of the painting, right there.
I loved sending and receiving emails when I was four, six, and eight years old, but I soon discovered their treachery. When my school gave every student a computer, even snow became sad. I stopped having unstructured snow days around the sixth grade. To make the most of my time, my teachers emailed me more than a full day of work by 8:00 AM, and I was required to email my completed assignments to them by 3:30 PM, while pretty, fluffy snow collected outside without a single screaming child to ruin its picturesque appearance. Adults who worry about the perils of 11-year-olds wasting their time are missing the point. 11-year-olds should waste their time. Sometimes, adults should waste their time, too.